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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Harris and who I think was either Hughes or Stewart a podcast where they talked about how cringey and out of touch the elite are on the topic of race or wokeness in general.

This faux pas on google's part couldn't be a better illustration of this. A bunch of wealthy rich tech geeks programming an AI to show racial diversity in what were/are unambiguously not diverse settings.

They're just so painfully divorced from reality that they are just acting as a multiplier in making the problem worse. People say that we on the left are driving around a clown car, and google is out their putting polka dots and squeaky horns on the hood.

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I’d be curious to hear that podcast if you could link it. If that was genuinely his opinion, he’s missed the forest for the trees. Brand safety is the dominant factor, not “wokeness”. And certainly not by the choice of any individual programmer.

The purpose of these tools is quite plainly to replace human labor and consolidate power. So it doesn’t matter to me how “safe” the AI is if it is displacing workers and dumping them on our social safety nets. How “safe” is our world going to be if we have 25 trillionaires and the rest of us struggle to buy food? (Oh and don’t even think about growing your own, the seeds will be proprietary and land will be unaffordable.)

As long as the Left is worrying about whether the chatbots are racist, people won’t pay attention to the net effect of these tools. And if Sam Harris considers himself part of the Left he is unfortunately playing directly into their hands.

> As long as the Left is worrying about whether the chatbots are racist, people won’t pay attention to the net effect of these tools.

It's by design. A country obsessed with racial politics has little time for the politics of anything else.

Exactly. What a coincidence that the media's obsession with race and gender inequalities began right after Occupy Wall Street.

As I recall, it began right after the George Floyd murder. It was clearly time for things to change, and the media latched onto that.

I think it was amplified in 2020. I hear many cite 2015 as the year things got woke. Terms like "preferred pronoun" started entering the mainstream around 2015, one year after GamerGate (not that that was the cause).

Picking a starting point is always going to be somewhat arbitrary, but the moment it became mainstream was probably when Hillary Clinton won the nomination in 2016 by explicitly moving away from economic issues:

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-line...

When were you born? Gender and race were pretty hot topics in the 1960s, you might have missed that.

Watch your opinion on this get silenced in subtle ways. From gaslighting to thread nerfing to vote locking.... Ask why anyone would engage in those behaviours vs the merit of the arguments and the voice of the people.

The strings are revealing themselves so incredibly fast.

edit: my first flagged! silence is deafening ^_^. This is achieved by nerfing the thread from public view, then allow the truly caustic to alter the vote ratio in a way that makes opinion appear more balanced than it really is. Nice work, kleptomaniacs

And yet here their paragraph still is, unmoderated, on a front page story, 6 hours later. If you’re going to cry oppression, at least provide a single example.

Log off and go outside for a bit.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait and otherwise breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I’ll be more subtle in my agenda to match the spirit of the site

Ok, since you don't want to use HN as intended, I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The behaviour seems perfectly reasonable to me. They are not in the business of reflecting reality, they are in the business of creating it. To me what you call wokeness seems like a pretty good improvement

You want large tech companies "creating reality" on behalf of everyone else? They're not even democratic institutions that we vote on. You trust they will get it right? Our benevolent super rich overlords.

Its not really a question about want, its a question about facts. Their actions will make a significant mark on the future. So far it seems like they are trying to promote positive changes such as inclusion and equality. Which is far far far fucking really infinitely far better than trying to promote exclusion and inequality

This switch might flip instantaneously.

They always seem to forget that we want to protect them too

You are so right! Just not the way you want to be.

Google and the rest of “techs” ham fisted approach has opened the eyes of millions to the bigotry these companies are forcing on everyone in the name of “improvement” as you put it.

If it's a question of facts, why are you allowing blind assumptions to lead your opinion? Do you have sources and evidence for their agenda that matches your beliefs?

Can you please explain how outright refusing to draw an image with from the prompt "white male scientist", and instead giving a lecture on how their race is irrelevant to their occupation, but then happily drawing the requested image when prompted for "black female scientist", is promoting inclusion and equality?

He can't.

It is pretty clear to me.

Reality has a bias, most scientist in the world are white males.

This IA is overtuned in the opossite direction to inspire kids who have not ever seen a person like them, not white, in those kind of jobs.

Saying most scientists in the world are white males seems like a very Anglo-centric perspective, at least based on the numbers available from statista.com.

Most scientists in the world are either Indian or Chinese. And, either way, that's not the point here.

There’s a huge difference between filling in gaps with diversity and refusing to make innocuous pictures a user explicitly asked for—except only when “white” is involved while making any picture with black people in it even when ahistorical.

I've found that anyone who uses the term "wokeness" seriously is likely arguing from a place of bad faith.

It's origins are as a derogatory term, which people wanting to speak seriously on the topic should know.

Its origin was as a proud self-assigned term. It became derogatory entirely due to the behavior of said people. People wanting to speak seriously on the topic should avoid tone-policing and arguing about labels rather than the object referenced, despite knowing full well what is meant (otherwise, one wouldn't take offence)

While the terms "woke," "stay woke," and similar are used to self describe by traditionally marginalized groups, the forms "wokeness" and "woke agenda" are predominately used outside these communities as a pejorative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/woke-bill-maher-olympics-re...

This is true, but you could say the same about "Tory", or many other labels for political groups that are used by supporters and opponents alike. It refers to a thing that some people have good and some people have poor opinions on, but the label is just a proxy, not a cause or carrier of opinion itself

I use it because everyone knows the general set of ideas an adherent of it has, whether or not they claim to be part of the ideology.

Its the same as me using the term "rightoids" when discussing opposition to something like building bike lanes. You know exactly who that person is, and you know they exist.

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